


Yellow Angels

by Hormonal_Trashbag



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Blood and Gore, Car Accidents, F/M, Graphic Description, Heavy Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-14
Updated: 2017-05-14
Packaged: 2018-10-31 14:49:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10901586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hormonal_Trashbag/pseuds/Hormonal_Trashbag
Summary: Ben growled. It was late, and it was snowing. The road was mostly empty. He flipped a u-turn without a word of warning.He hadn’t been pleased about his father’s unprecedented visit, and even less pleased that he hadn’t been told of it until he had landed in Vancouver International. As far as he was concerned, his father could stay in the cheapest hotel and take the first flight back to San Francisco in the morning. He wasn’t obligated to put him up.





	Yellow Angels

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah. So, please PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THE TAGS. There isn't any physical fighting in this fic but there is a graphic, detailed description of a car accident. I don't want anyone to be taken by surprise.
> 
> Song Rec: Yellow Angels, by Senses Fail

As the car begins to roll  
I smile as I lose control  
This weightlessness is such a gift  
'Cause gravity has lost its hold

 

* * *

 

 

It was cold. He squeezed the steering wheel, refusing to glance his father’s way. His car was an older model, the heating ineffective. Ben didn’t care. It was his. There were so few things that were.

“You need to come home.”

Ben grit his teeth, glowering resolutely at the icy road. He had nothing to say.

“Your mother and I did _not_ put you through four years of college for you to fuck off to Vancouver and start a garage band.”

“Did you have to move to another goddamned country just to get away from us?”

“Drop it, dad,” he finally snapped back, shooting a scathing glare to his unwanted passenger.

“I’m not going to _drop it_ just because this is making you uncomfortable, Ben--”

Ben growled. It was late, and it was snowing. The road was mostly empty. He flipped a u-turn without a word of warning.

He hadn’t been pleased about his father’s unprecedented visit, and even less pleased that he hadn’t been told of it until he had landed in Vancouver International. As far as he was concerned, his father could stay in the cheapest hotel and take the first flight back to San Francisco in the morning. He wasn’t obligated to put him up.

“Where are you going now?” his father barked. “For fuck’s sake--”

“For once, would you just shut up?” Ben snarled back. “I don’t need any of your fatherly advice bullshit.”

His father crossed his arms over his chest. It wasn’t as broad as Ben remembered. A lot of his father had faded to gray or dwindled. Everything but his anger and disappointment. _I should have just trained you to be a mechanic since you’re not using your degree._

“I’m not going to just shut up, Ben. Your mother is heartbroken--”

Ben scoffed loudly. _“Please.”_

“--you have a responsibility to your family. If you’re not going to go to law school, then--”

Ben jabbed at the cassette player violently. He had forgotten what was in it. Hux had made a recording earlier and liked to use tapes because he fancied himself to be a strange mixture of grunge and hipster. Though he loathed to admit it, Hux was a decent guitar player. His singing could use work, though. There was a reason Ben was on vocals.

“Are you trying to give me a heart attack?” his father was yelling now, so loudly that Ben couldn’t think.

He reached to shut off the music. Ben wasn’t going to let him, solely out of spite.

There was a struggle, because that was what their relationship had deteriorated to, before everything was very abruptly still all at once. It was too still. Unrealistic, even.

Had he missed a light? A stop sign? Tires squealed like a shrieking boar.

And then they were airborne, a tumble of screeching metal. Ben’s vision was a horrifying, slow blur of black night and wet pavement and the snow bank on the side of the road, and he tried to blink back the nightmarish kaleidoscope that threatened to overload his senses. His father was still yelling, likely always would be.

They were upside-down, then right-side-up, then upside-down once more. The contents of his cupholders and the trash he had tossed in the foot space of the passenger’s side seemed to hang in limbo with him as they rolled, until it all settled in the crushed, concave roof.

Ben wouldn’t know, though. He was still feeling shockwaves from the initial impact, waiting for time to catch up. He waited for something to start hurting, expected it. Everything was numbed in shock.

Logically he should feel something more. He thickly recalled a hot flash of something along his face and down his arm. Perhaps he was dead, though he put little stock in any afterlife, so why was he still thinking?

He was hanging in his chair, hair moist as it dripped towards the roof below him. Hux’s tape was still roaring, the cassette player perhaps the only part of the car that was unscathed, and the irony was not lost on him.

“Dad?” he moaned at last. He hadn’t pieced himself together quite well enough yet to see what sort of state the older man was in.

Speaking had caused nausea to roll in his gut. He had hit his head. Ben heaved.

He could suddenly feel everything. His face was on fire. His arm was on fire. Somewhere on the back of his head was hot with blood.

Ben could smell it then, taste it in the air, twisted metal and exhaust fumes blended with a slick, iron-rich saltiness that made his lip curl back in revulsion. He managed to turn his head.

“Dad?” he repeated, frantic this time.

His father’s blood had formed a dark slick under him. He noticed that first. Then he saw the pipe. It acted as a tap, draining his punctured chest of its gore. For a horrible moment, Ben hoped his father was dead. He hoped stubborn, seething Han Solo wasn’t alive with a pipe through his lungs, rattling his painful last.

His head swam, and all he could think about was the time his hockey team placed second in the state championship in his sophomore year of high school, and his father had brought him home and let him cringe at his first taste of whiskey, laughter lining his red face. They had moved for his mother’s career the next year, to a school that didn’t have a hockey team.

“Dad!” Ben croaked, fumbling with his buckle--his right arm won’t move, and he was terrified to check why--and when he finally managed to release it, he fell onto his left palm, the thick glass of his shattered windshield biting into toughened skin.

His face felt moist and warm, and Ben couldn’t tell if he was crying or not. He couldn’t move more though, and he couldn’t see his father’s face, just his ruptured chest, still upside-down and trickling.

He wouldn’t breathe. His eyes saw spotted. It was cold. It was snowing, Ben remembered. He was still burning.

It all turned black to the crunch of boots in the snow, an unknown voice shouting.

 

* * *

 

Ben jolted.

He struggled to work out where, exactly, he was. A moving vehicle, he could barely comprehend. There was a discombobulated, shrill screaming, and god--everything was still on fire. He could feel the burning rage of torn flesh all over.

An ambulance, he realized belatedly.

He inhaled. When he exhaled, his breath left his chest in a sob.

The EMT gripped his hand. Ben wasn’t sure she was supposed to do that. He thrashed against the straps that kept him in place.

“Sir, I need you to calm down and look at me,” she said. “Do you remember what happened?”

He teared up as he tried to look towards the sound of her voice. _Rey,_ her badge said.

He squeezed her hand back, and he wondered if it was too tight because she winced.

He remembered what happened. The long moment of weightlessness and the spinning of earth and sky, both equally dark. Being on fire, hanging in his seat. His father. The pipe. The _blood._

His voice cracked. “My dad--is...is he dead?”

Ben already knew the answer, before he asked. Then he saw her face and the terrible truth was etched into her eyes. She didn’t need to say a word, and perhaps that’s why she didn’t.

He tried to lift his arms to cover his face, to smother his own awful wailing. His right arm still wouldn’t move. Ben refused to look at it. He was overwhelmed with the urge to hurl again.

“What have I done?” he bawled. “My dad--I’ve _killed_ my own dad.”

Her own eyes are glossy. He almost laughed that she had the worst poker face of anyone he’s ever met. EMTs aren’t supposed to cry, he thought to himself.

Still, she forced herself to ask, “Sir, can I get your name?”

Fuck his name, he wanted to roar back at her. His father is _dead_. The last thing they ever did was argue, and that knowledge is like a hot brand in his throat. He gags on it. How is he supposed to call his mother? His name didn’t matter.

“Ben,” he warbles, tongue heavy in his mouth, “Ben Solo.”

It’s all still burning. It’s become all he knows.

 

* * *

 

Hours pass in a blur of morphine. His head is blissfully clouded as his puzzle pieces are fit together. When his mind becomes less muddled, he’s told he has options, and Ben didn’t know what that meant so he ignored the hope-inspiring, fluffy language his doctors all used in favor of rest.

At about nine in the morning, Hux stopped over for a grand total of six minutes, and even that was amazing to Ben. He hadn’t anticipated a visit at all. Though he and his bandmates played together frequently, they didn’t get involved in each other’s personal lives.

Ben half expected Hux had come to see him with the sole purpose of checking whether or not he needed to start searching for a new vocalist. Satisfied that his voice was not in any danger, Hux saw no need to keep him company, and Ben should have been insulted, but the drugs had given him a wonderful sense of apathy.

His EMT crept slowly into his room an hour later. She had changed into jeans and a sweater, and had a backpack thrown over her shoulder, so he could only assume she had just finished her shift.

“You can come in,” he grumbled, voice cracking with disuse.

Looking a bit sheepish, she closed the door behind her, then oh-so-helpfully poured him a cup of water and handed it to him. Put off by her unexpected presence yet thankful, he accepted the water and drank until breaking into a coughing fit.

“Don’t _drown_ yourself,” she scolded, setting his cup on a bedside table.

Ben didn’t know what to say to his visitor. Evidently, she didn’t entirely know either.

“When I checked with the nurses, they said your friend only stayed for a few minutes.”

His apathy was potent enough to spur honesty in him. “I wouldn’t exactly call him my friend.”

She nodded her head, glancing about his hospital room. There were no flowers, no get well cards, no stuffed teddy bears or balloons; nothing to indicate that anyone cared he had nearly died less than twelve hours ago.

“Do you have anyone in the area you can call? Any family?”

He shook his head once. “I have a mother, but she’s in San Francisco. I’m not sure if she knows what happened yet.”

Her face fell with sympathy. She sat in the nearby chair, scooting it closer to his bed, and he did nothing to stop her. Ben wasn’t sure he wanted the company, but it didn’t feel right to send her away. He watched as she tucked her feet under her legs.

“I can help you get ahold of her if you want,” she told him quietly.

Ben opened his mouth, reconsidered, then closed it again, deciding against anything he had to say. The EMT--Rey--was a stranger. He only knew her name because he had read it off her badge, and he couldn’t make sense of her motivation. Why should she care? He made it to the hospital alive, her part in saving him was completed.

He remembered the look she had in the ambulance, and how she had taken his hand. Grief and confusion churned in his gut.

“If I was in your position, I would want someone to offer help,” she said in explanation.

He swallowed, mouth still dry. “Your family live elsewhere too?”

Ben had only meant to shift the attention off himself, but he saw as her expression became stone, a forced smile on her face.

“I lost both of my parents in an accident almost twenty years ago.”

He understood then that what he saw in her eyes wasn’t pain, but loneliness. Ben regretted bringing up her family in an instant.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she replied, a small smile softening as it became more genuine. “That was a long time ago. I only meant to explain why I acted so strangely. It was inappropriate of me to hold your hand, but I’m a bit new to this.”

Ben blinked at her. The words spilled without any apparent control. “Will you hold it again?”

She looked tired.

“Yeah, of course.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. :')


End file.
